Download bourdieu – habitus, symbolic violence, the gift

BOURDIEU – HABITUS, SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE, THE
GIFT: “YOU GIVE ME / I GIVE YOU” PRINCIPLE
ASSISTANT CRISTINA NICOLAESCU,
“DIMITRIE CANTEMIR” CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY
[email protected]
Abstract: In this paper, my aim is to give an outline of Bourdieu’s
sociological theories, of his unitary representation of social science, annihilating
the disciplinary borderlines between sociology and anthropology. It is not only
about the proposal of a new epistemological basis to the Durkheimian tradition,
but also the conceptual and methodological apparatus necessary to such an
approach. The critique of the perspectives (he inspired from originally) represented
by the structuralist objectivism (Claude Levi-Strauss) and existential
subjectivism (Jean-Paul Sartre) constitutes the “strategic” movement of analysis
or overcoming of the dominant positions in the French space. Further I point out
the implications of applying the idea of gift exchange mechanism, in classdifferentiated societies, their affective effects (gratitude, love, admiration). In the
hypothesis centred on the gift exchange, an agent sacrifices its profit for a longterm binding relationship. The idea is to aim at a larger profit through alliances
that are formed as an effect of gift exchange. All this are shown briefly by
explaining the key concepts that Bourdieu uses in the sources cited.
The concept of symbolic capital is constructed starting from the analysis of the
“sense of honour” in the Kabyle society. Hereupon, Bourdieu resumes a central theme
of anthropology: the gift exchange (gift/counter gift) addressed to the famous study by
Marcel Mauss. He highlighted the strategic dimension, dissimulation of price
calculation and time frame between giving and receiving. The concept of habitus has
had a long tradition in the philosophical thinking. This Latin term is used as different
from the word habitude. It represents the “system of dispositions”, “structuring
structure”, namely a predisposition, tendency, propensity, inclination.
Keywords: habitus, symbolic violence, gift, I give you-you give me,
symbolic capital, symbolic domination, field.
Felix Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist whose work used
methods from a wide range of disciplines, from philosophy and literary
theory to sociology and anthropology. The most important aspects of
Bourdieu's theory concern the development of methodologies, combining
theory and empirical data that attempt to solve some of the most difficult
problems of theory and research in an attempt to reconcile the difficulties,
such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. His
work stressed the role of practice and its incorporation into social
dynamic. Bourdieu was a passionate political activist and a strong
opponent to modern forms of globalization. He saw sociology as a
weapon against social oppression and injustice, to the extent to which it is
used to protect against symbolic domination and the imposition of
thought distortion categories. In this way, Bourdieu used the intellect
weapon to discover unknown mechanisms, which remain separate and
unequal various social groups in their struggle for a better world for all.
His work emphasized the role of practice and incorporation or forms,
and social dynamics in shaping the vision of the world, often in opposition
to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He used the theories of
philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein Ludwig and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
From Marcel Mauss and Claude Levi-Strauss, Bourdieu inherited a
particular structuralist interpretation of the social structures’ tendency to
replicate, based on the symbolic structures analysis and classification
forms. However, Bourdieu separated critically from durkheimian
analysss, highlighting the role of social agents in the application of
symbolic order, by incorporating social structures. He stressed that, in
addition, the reproduction of social structures not operating according to a
functionalist logic.
The debate on the primacy of structure and agency on human thought
and behaviour is one of the central issues in sociology and other social
sciences. In this context, "Agency" refers to a person's ability to act
independently and make their own free choices. Bourdieu's work is built
on trying to transcend a series of oppositions that characterized the social
sciences (subjectivism / objectivism, micro / macro, freedom /
determinism). In particular, he made that through conceptual innovations.
The concepts of habitus, capital, and field have been created, indeed, to
eliminate such oppositions.
Bourdieu, in general, tried to connect his theoretical ideas to empirical
research activity, based on everyday life, and his work can be considered
sociology of culture or, as he himself labelled it, “a theory of practice." For
Bourdieu, each individual occupies a position in a multidimensional social
space; he or she is defined not only by social class, but by any kind of
capital that can be articulated through social relations. This capital
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includes the value of social networks, which Bourdieu showed they could
be used to produce or reproduce inequality. The social field can become
more complex and autonomous, while the individual develops a typical
habitus for his/her position within the social space. In doing so, social
agents will often confirm, legitimate and reproduce the social forms of
domination (including prejudices), and the common views of each field as
taken for granted – at the level of consciousness and practice - even the
confirmation of other possible inputs (including, of course, symbolic
production) and power relations. Although it is not deterministic, the
inculcation of subjective structures of habitus can be observed by
evidence, for example, while its selective affinity with objective structures
of social world justify the continuity of social order over time. Since
individual habitus is always a mixture of several commitments in a
person's social life, and the social field is put into practice by individuals’
action, no social order or field may be completely stable. In other words, if
the relationship between individual predisposition and social structure is
much stronger than the one usually considered, it means that there is an
no perfect match
What Bourdieu called symbolic violence is the self-interested ability to
ensure that social order arbitrariness is either ignored or considered
natural, thus justifying the legitimacy of existing social structures. This
concept plays an essential role in the sociological analysis. Bourdieu
developed a theory of action around the concept of habitus, which has
exerted a considerable influence in social sciences. This theory seeks to
demonstrate that social agents create strategies tailored to the needs of the
social world in which they live. The basic concepts of this theory are
shown hereafter.
The concept of habitus
Trying to recover the intellectual parentage of the habitus idea led to
the conclusion that it has its roots in the structural anthropology of Claude
Levi-Strauss and in the development psychology of Jean Piaget,
particularly the latter’s generalization of the operations concept in
mathematics to the study of practical knowledge, bodily intermediated.
Habitus is a complex concept, but in its simplest use it would be
understood as a structure characterized as a mind structure characterized
by acquired schemes, sensitivities, dispositions and taste. The particular
contents of habitus is the result of objectifying social structure at
individual subjectivity level. He introduced the concept of symbolic
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violence, to explain the silent modes, almost unconscious, of cultural /
social domination occurring in the daily social habits, maintained over the
conscious subjects in order to reveal the dynamics of power relations in
social life.
Firstly, the habitus appears to be a useful way to conceptualize action
and capacity to transform social structure. Thus, one of Bourdieu's major
contributions to social theory is the fact that he developed a new radical
form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel
sociological explanation, which is evidenced by the interaction of different
structural orders.
Secondly, habitus is an important theoretical object that protects
extent Bourdieu's theory from becoming a purely rationalist formalism
positional strategies employed by agents of various types of capital
accumulation and allows analysis of the social agent as a player under
constraints developmental, cognitive and emotional, affected by actual
configurations, physical and institutional field.
Thirdly, a return of habitus to the intellectual origins allows us to
appreciate Bourdieu’s development of a new sociological analysis style,
one deemed to be a cognitive creative sociology that takes seriously the
historic development of the perception, classification and action schemes
that are responsible for social reproduction at macrostructure level and for
change. The use of this cognitive approach to sociological analysis can be
demonstrated with examples from his work on aesthetic perception and
appreciation and anthropology with application to the Kabyle society. The
constituent structures of a particular type of environment produce
habitus, systems of sustainable, transposable dispositions, structures
predisposed to function as structuring structures, as principles of
generation and structuring of practices and representations. The practices
produced by habitus represent a principle that is generator of strategies,
enabling agents to cope with contingencies and ever changing situations.
Habitus was inspired by the idea of "body techniques” and Marcel
Mauss's hexis. The word itself can be found in the works of Aristotle,
Norbert Elias, Max Weber, Edmund Husserl and Erwin Panofsky. For
Bourdieu, habitus was essential to address prominent antinomies of the
human sciences: objectivism and subjectivism. Habitus, defined as a system
of dispositions (with duration, acquired schemes of perception, thought
and action), the individual agents develop these dispositions in response
to objective conditions they encounter. In this way, Bourdieu argued that
objective social structure absorption into a set of dispositions of a
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personal, cognitive and somatic nature, and that subjective structures of
action of the agents are then proportioned to existing objective structures
and requirements of the social field, create a doxic relationship. Habitus is
somewhat reminiscent of earlier sociological concepts, such as
socialization, but different from more classic concepts in several important
ways. First of all, a central aspect of habitus is its incorporation: it does not
work only at the explicit discursive level of consciousness. According to
Bourdieu, it represents “assessment and action arising from the institution
of the social in the body" (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 87). This
connection between objective and subjective is based on the physical body.
The body structure scheme is the centre of habitus concept – the
structure and capacities of our body, from which we learn through
assimilation or change of habits and dispositions. Through these corporal
skills and guidelines, agents are able, in their turn, to engage themselves
in the world of others. This is a matter of body, because what is embodied
are acquired motion abilities, postural sets and social acts that create
distinct forms of motility and perception. Hysteresis is an effect involved
in the establishment of habitus, to the extent to which it internalizes the
negative sanctions in a field away from its component dispositions (being
at the origin of oppositional systems generation).
Therefore, understanding and perception that constitute a habitus,
being congruent with the objective of field organization, tend to reproduce
its very structures. Hence, Bourdieu regarded habitus as the key to social
reproduction, because it is the generation and regulation centre of
practices that constitute social life.
How an individual lives creates dispositions consistent with the
objective conditions (including tastes in art, literature, food, and music)
and in a sense, pre-adapted to their requirements.
In Bourdieu's theory, the action is not directly observable in practices
or in habitus, but only in the experience of subjectivity. His references to
habitus, it seems that so much of the individual's habitus is predetermined
by social habitus, that these dispositions can neither be changed nor
ignored.
In conclusion, habitus is a set of dispositions that generate practices
and perceptions, and within the original meaning: a normal or typical
condition, state or appearance of the body. In Bourdieu, it represents a
combination of a) disposition, 2) generating and classifying schemes
(Jenkins p. 74).
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As a mediator between the influences of the past and present stimuli,
habitus is at the same time structured by social model forces that have
produced it, while structuring gives shape and consistency to the various
activities of an individual in the distinct spheres of life. That is why
Bourdieu defines it as '”a product of history, habitus produces practices,
individual and collective, hence history, according to the schemes
generated by history; it ensures the active presence of past experiences
that, deposited in any organism in the form of perception, though and
action schemes, tend more certain than all formal rules and explicit rules,
to guarantee the conformity of practices and their consistency over time.
"(Pierre Bourdieu, The Practical sense, p.85).
Habitus is also a principle of both social continuity and the
discontinuity: continuity because it stores social forces in the individual
and carries them in time and space; discontinuity because it can be
changed through the acquisition of new dispositions and because it can
trigger innovation whenever encountering a social situation discordant to
the established one.
Bourdieu regards symbolic capital (e.g. prestige, honour, care), as an
essential source of power. When a symbolic capital holder uses his/her
power against an agent who has less, and thus seeks to change his/her
actions, thereby he/she exercises a symbolic violence.
Symbolic violence
Symbolic violence is, fundamentally, the imposition of categories of
thought and perception on the prevailing social agents. This is the
incorporation of unconscious structures that tend to perpetuate the action
structures of dominators. Symbolic violence is in some ways, more
powerful than physical violence, since it is incorporated even in modes of
action and knowledge structures of individuals, and imposes the
legitimacy spectrum of social order.
Bourdieu's philosophical anthropology is not based on the concept of
interest, but that of recognition. Contrary to a common reading of his
work, his theory is not a utilitarian one, of social action, one by which the
individuals make a conscious strategy to accumulate wealth, high status
or power. But social existence means difference and difference implies
hierarchy, which, in its turn, implies the infinite dialectic between
distinction and claim, recognition and non-recognition, arbitrariness and
necessity. The analysis of masculine domination, the form par excellence
of symbolic violence, is based on the ethnological research of Kabylia
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(North Africa). Symbolic violence is an act of non-recognition which is
outside the control of consciousness and will, in the practical schemes of
habitus. Men and women acquire different dispositions toward social
games that are considered the most important. In the societies
differentiated by class, the most appreciated games are those of politics,
art, science, etc. This explains the lower status of women and it
presupposes considering inequality of women’s and men’s statuses in the
economy of symbolic exchanges.
Next we analyze how the exchange of gifts operates and what effects
it has, starting from the concept of symbolic capital and the obligation to
give something to the person from which you have received something.
The Gift: “You give me / I give you” principle
Capital is of three main types: economic (material and financial
assets), cultural (symbolic goods, skills and titles) and social (resources
gained by virtue of affiliation to a group). A fourth type, symbolic capital,
designates the effects of any form of capital, when people do not perceive
them as such (as when we ascribe noble moral qualities to upper class
members as a result of their charitable money donations). Therefore, the
position of an individual, group or institution in the social space can be
established according to two coordinates, the total volume and
composition of the capital it holds. A third coordinate, the variation of the
volume and composition over time, marks their trajectory through social
space and provides important clues about their habitus, revealing how
and in which way they have reached the position they currently occupy.
While the idea of gift is very old, it appears to be an important
sociological concept even today, especially in the business world. As
Bourdieu points out, the mechanism of gifts exchange also structures
practice in modern societies and, moreover, even practice in the economic
field of the highly differentiated contemporary society (Practical sense,
Bourdieu 2000, Chapter: Structures, habitus, practice). Reciprocity essence
itself and accompanying feeling of gratitude are crucial in almost all
societies. In the theory Habitus - Field, Bourdieu explained the sociological
basis of gifts exchange, in the real world, where individuals and
organizations exchange presents; the practical purposes is to build reliable
partnerships in order to survive and to accumulate capital in the market
where competitions are fierce (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992).
The practice of gifts exchange allows agents to bear small losses in order to
build a stable and long relationship with another one. One more practical
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reason behind giving gifts, also explained by Bourdieu, is to achieve
supremacy over other persons or organizations, keeping them indebted by
the favour granted in the form a gift.
The sociological analysis is the most powerful tool of human
knowledge as social science and the freedom it may gain in spite of social
determinisms. The general principles of symbolic assets economy start
from the understanding of Kabylia’s economy. I give you, you give me
(donnant-donnant) expresses a conditioned exchange. For Mauss, gifts
exchange is a discontinuous succession of generous acts, for Levi-Strauss,
a transcendental reciprocity structure of exchange acts, where a gift
presupposes a counter-gift. The determinant role of the time that passes
from a gift to a counter-gift is underlined. In all the societies it is tacitly
admitted that people should not respond immediately to what they have
received, which would be equal to a refusal. Also this time interval’s
function is analyzed: why counter-gift should be deferred and different? It
is explained that the time interval has a covering function between the gift
and counter-gift, so that the two symbolic acts can look as a single acts,
without any connection. The gift is a free, generous act, which is not
intended to be returned (as there is always the risk not to be returned).
Uncertainty in the time interval between the gift and counter-gift is
therefore necessary. Exchanging gifts, which is seen as a paradigm of
symbolic assets economy, is opposite to the "I give you, you give me"
principle by the fact that it requires an agent to enter in the exchange game
with no calculation. From the usual exchange acts to potlatch there is a
level difference. The one that offers and the one that receives should have
identical categories of perception and appreciation for the symbolic
exchange to function properly. This finds the same applications to the
symbolic domination that occurs with the complicity of the dominated
ones. The most important and relevant aspect of symbolic violence is, no
doubt, the transformation of domination relations, respectively
submission in affective relationships, so that recognition becomes
gratitude.
Symbolic alchemy produces a gratitude capital which symbolic effects
are exercised, which Bourdieu called: symbolic capital. Since the structures
of perception and appreciation are the result of objective structures
incorporation, symbolic capital distribution of enjoys stability. "When we
forget that the one who offers and the one who receives are prepared and
inclined, through a long process of socialization, to enter with no intention
and no profit calculation in the generous exchange whose logic is imposed
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on them objectively, we can conclude there is not “free gift” or it is
impossible, because, we can only think of the two agents as some
computers offering as subjective project to do what they are objectively
meant to do, according to Levi-Strauss's model, that is an exchange
following the logic of reciprocity. "(Pierre Bourdieu, Practical reasons - A
Theory of Action, p. 131)
Conclusions:
In order to achieve the synthesis between objectivism and
subjectivism, Bourdieu creates an original conceptual basis anchored in
the terms of habitus, capital, field and doxa. Habitus designates the
durable and transposable dispositions system by which we perceive, judge
in act in the society. These schemes which are not normally aware of are
acquired by the durable exposure to particular conditions and social
conditioning, by internalizing the constraints and external circumstances.
This means that they are shared by the persons who undergo similar
experiences, even if each of them has an individual way of manifestation
in that common matrix.
Symbolic capital refers to the effects of any capital forms, as a resource
and means of exercising power through symbolic domination.
By creating feelings of affection and gratitude, the exchange of gifts is
a form of domination itself, especially in case of disparity between the one
who gives and the one who receives the gift. Bourdieu's vision of the
society is a tough and infinite competition, where the specific differences
of social, collective life appear. He showed it to us in a logical and clear
manner, typical of his entire work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cited works:
1. Bourdieu, P. & Wacquant, L. An Invitation to Reflexive
Sociology, Cambridge Polity Press, 1992
2. Richard Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu, NY: Routledge, 1992.
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Sources:
[1] Bourdieu, Pierre Raţiuni practice – O teorie a acţiunii, Ed. Meridiane,
Bucureşti, 1999.
[2] Bourdieu, Pierre, Simţul practic – Institutul European, Iaşi, 2000.
[3] Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and
Literature, Randal Johnson, intro & ed. Cambridge, Polity P, 1993.
"Introduction" 1-28; "The Field of Cultural Production" 29-73.
[4] Bourdieu, Pierre, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, NY 1998.
[5] Bourdieu Pierre: A Critical Reader, ed. by Richard Shusterman,
1999.
[6] An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu, ed. by Richard
Harker, Chellen Mahar, and Chris Wilkes (1990).
[7] Jenkins, Richard Pierre Bourdieu, NY: Routledge, 1992.
[8] Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory by Bridget Fowler, 1997.
[9] Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. by Craig Calhoun, Edward
LiPuma, and Moishe Postone, 1993
[10] Pierre Bourdieu, Marginalia - Some Additional Notes on the Gift, ed.
Schrift, The Logic of the Gift: p. 231-241.
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